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On Why We Buy Travel Insurance

When I started this travel blog, never did I think I’d be talking about travel insurance, let alone spending money on it. But here I am, six years into our blog, talking about travel insurance, and buying it before many of our trips. Yes, we’re officially old. Or grown up, depending on how you look at it.

I didn’t buy travel insurance because I never thought we needed it. It was an added expense that we could have done without. Up until recently, I wasn’t even willing to pay for tours simply because it was cheaper to guide ourselves. If I wasn’t willing to pay for a guide at Angkor Wat so we could better appreciate it, then what more with something like travel insurance that we probably weren’t going to use anyway? Frankly, it felt like money down the drain.

But therein lay the error in my thinking, that I was so sure we wouldn’t be using it. How did I know?

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that nothing in life is guaranteed. You could be up one moment and down the next. You could have everything you ever wanted one day and then poof…the next day it’s all gone, and your life is completely different. I’ve learned that the hard way.

The truth is, we don’t have control over many aspects of our life. Our safety, our well-being, isn’t always guaranteed. And this becomes especially true when we travel.

Here’s Ren with her cousin Brooke skiing in Sapporo. We did a lot of physical activities on this trip, things that could have gotten us hurt, so it was a no-brainer for us to get insurance. At our age, I wouldn’t have gone without it.

I’m closer to 50 than I am to 30 and I’m nowhere near as arrogant as I once was. Like many kids, I used to think that I was invincible, that nothing bad I saw on tv could ever happen to me. Thankfully, nothing has, but I don’t think that way anymore. I have a lot more to lose now and I’m wise enough to understand that even though I’m careful, things can still happen that are beyond my control.

I work very hard. I work no less than 50-60 hours a week on top of all the time and effort I put into this blog. I’m not going to risk losing what I’ve worked so hard for simply because I was too shortsighted or too cheap to buy travel insurance. Sure, it’s an added expense. But in the grand scheme of things, it really isn’t that expensive.

Take our trip to Japan for example. I paid USD 110.30 for two weeks of coverage for both Ren and myself. That’s a little over USD 55 each for the peace of mind that should anything happen to us while skiing, our insurance policy had a coverage limit of USD 5 million for medical expenses. I didn’t want to break my leg in a country as expensive as Japan, so the decision to get travel insurance for that trip was an easy one.

Here we are riding a snowmobile on that same trip to Japan. Neither of us had ever been on a snowmobile before. Do you think it would have been wise to do this without travel insurance? In Japan?

This was from a trip to Cappadocia, Turkey. We had just polished off an entire bottle of red wine when on a whim, we decided to go on a horseback riding tour. Both of us had little to no experience riding horses but it seemed the perfect thing to do since the name Cappadocia meant “land of beautiful horses”. It was an unforgettable afternoon. Thankfully, we didn’t fall off and break our necks but this was an experience we probably wouldn’t have had the courage to do without the cushion of travel insurance.

The very next morning, we got into a hot air balloon to get a bird’s eye view of Cappadocia’s moonscape. Admittedly, insurance probably would have done little for us in this situation had anything gone wrong. 😆

This was from our most recent trip to My Son Sanctuary in Vietnam. I bought travel insurance because I mistakenly thought this would be a bike tour. As it turned out, it wasn’t, but I was still glad we had insurance. 😆

There’s me eating what could very well be the best durum in Istanbul, at least according to Anthony Bourdain. I was happy to have insurance here because this durum was dangerously delicious.

Just kidding. The durum was good, but I didn’t need insurance in that case. I bring this up for a reason. Even though I think it’s important to get insurance when traveling, there are times when you don’t need it as much. Sure, anything can still happen, but the risks are less in some cases.

If you’ll be spending a few days in Singapore or Hong Kong for example, just shopping and eating and staying away from anything remotely physical, then you probably won’t need it as much. We did exactly that in those two countries along with Penang and Macau last year, and we didn’t get travel insurance on any of those trips. But had we done anything physical, even something as seemingly harmless as a city bike ride, then I would have gotten insurance for sure.

At the end of the day, it’s up to you to weigh the risks and decide if travel insurance is a good investment or not. For me, it’s on a trip by trip basis. The way I see it, a 3-day food trip to Osaka probably wouldn’t call for it as much, but throw in bungee jumping, sky diving, ATV riding, or anything like that, then yes, absolutely. I wouldn’t even think twice about it. It’s just one of those things that you wish you never had to use, but if you did need to use it, then you’ll be glad as hell that you had it.

Here we are riding bikes on a wire a hundred feet up in the air. Nothing unsafe about this at all.

I don’t profess to be an expert on travel insurance. In fact, I know very little about it. I don’t know much because I’ve never had to make any claims, and I’d like to keep it that way. But the one thing I do know is that nearly every long-term traveler I’ve come across uses World Nomads. Respected people in the industry like Nomadic Matt and Wandering Earl swear by this company, so I use them too. After all, who would know more about travel insurance than someone who travels for a living?

If you’re deliberating on getting travel insurance for your trip, then you can use the widget below to get a quotation. It’s free and it’ll give you a detailed rundown of exactly what you’ll be covered for. Aside from medical expenses, they also cover things like trip delays, missed flight connections, theft/loss of passport and luggage, etc.